Windows 8 Storage Spaces: Built-in RAID and thin provisioning for all the family

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With yet another beautiful example of feature creep and an overwhelming belief that Windows 8 must please all of the people all of the time, Microsoft has unveiled Storage Spaces, a new RAID-like storage solution that will be built into Windows 8.

In essence, Storage Spaces allows you to group physical disks into pools of any size (pools of hundreds of disks, as found in a datacenter, have been tested by Microsoft). These pools can be allocated as spaces, which then appear as a normal drive letter in Windows and can be used to store documents, videos, photos, and so on. Any array of physical disks can be used to make a pool — you can use a combination of external USB and internal SATA, if you wish. Spaces can be configured to be redundant and provisioned.

Redundancy in Storage Spaces is through either mirroring (RAID 1) or parity (RAID 3). In both cases, if a mirror or parity disk fails, Spaces will notify you with a Windows pop-up, and then proceed to rebuild your volume if you have the capacity. Otherwise, it’ll wait until you slot in another drive. Spaces can also stripe data (RAID 0) across a pool, and according to Microsoft performance is “very competitive” with actual RAID implementations.

Provisioning is a slightly more complex subject that doesn’t usually come up on home computers. Basically, a space is a virtual. You can set it to appear as any size, even if the underlying pool is much smaller. Provisioning allows you to create a “movies” space that is 10TB on a 2TB pool — then, when the pool begins to fill up, Windows/Storage Spaces will tell you to add another drive. The other advantage of thin provisioning is that you don’t have to decide on partition sizes ahead of time (an arduous task that many of you have no doubt suffered through). For example, if your computer has a 6TB pool of drives, you could put three 6TB spaces on top of it — games, movies, and photos — and then proceed to use all three spaces in any manner you like, simply adding more disks when and if you run out of space (pictured above). Never again will you have to worry about the size of your Steam folder!

Both pools and spaces can be created and managed using Powershell or a Control Panel applet. It looks like the process will be easy enough to set up, but whether it will be advertised to regular consumers (Clippy: “You seem to have multiple drives installed! Do you want me to set up a pool?”) or kept as a power user feature remains to be seen. As you can see from the screenshot above, Storage Spaces definitely aren’t part of the Metro experience.

If you’ve used Windows Home Server’s Drive Extender feature, this will all sound quite familiar — and rightly so, as it seems like Drive Extender was torn out of Windows Home Server 2011 and slotted into Windows 8. Much in the same way that OS X Server has been folded into the latest home version of Mac OS X, it looks like Windows 8 is shaping up to be a tablet, laptop, netbook, desktop, and home server OS — cool, as long as a license doesn’t cost the earth.

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Anonymous

I thought that sharing of information across the family was already in Windows 7?

Funny…it was part of their advertising campaign.

Ethan Schwartz

It is already there. before there was homegroup and you managed the files on each computer separetly. this lets you combine computer’s 1+ computers 2’s space together so when computer 1 fills up you can keep filling up on 2. and if computer 1 fails then it backs up to computer 2.

Oliver Petruzel

What are you talking about? I think you completely misunderstand this technology.

This is a LOCAL disk pooling solution (similar to Drive Extender in WHS v1.0). This is NOT a solution for pooling the storage on multiple computers across your network. Rajeev Nagar (Microsoft), in his comments at the blog, specifically states that network drives cannot be added to a pool — only local disks can be added — so, I’m not quite sure where you’re getting all the “computer 1″ and “computer 2″ stuff…? This new solution does NOT pool storage located on entirely separate computers.

Let me try to clarify this for you: Once LOCAL drives are added to a “Storage Space” on the Win8 machine, said Space appears the same as any single local hard drive or partition on Win7 machines today (ie. the Space is referenced as a single drive letter). The Storage Spaces can then be shared just as your standard hard drives and folders are shared across a network today — In other words, all the other computers on the network will simply see those Spaces as standard shared drives.

Make more sense now?

Anonymous

So basically…you’re just gonna be able to resize shares now.

Just what every home user has been wanting.

BumBumBumBuuuuuum

Aside from the fact that this is an awesome feature for Windows Server 2012, this feature benefits the home user as well (whether the average user will understand the benefit is another thing to consider). This feature supports striping data across numerous local drives (similar to RAID 0), which correlates to increased IO performance. Prior to Storage Spaces, one would require some technical knowledge for setting up support for RAID 0… now, this support is essentially free. Considering the average user might use pools to store large media files, this gratuitous increase in IO performance could greatly reduce write and read times for copying files to and from a drive that exists as a pool.

Anonymous

so now i dont need to buy Adrobo? i can just keep adding drives until I run out of space in my PC case?

Oliver Petruzel

you could go even further and just keep adding external enclosures once you’ve run out of internal space! ;)

Anonymous

This is an awesome addition to Win8 and I can’t wait to get to use it. It will be available in the public beta coming up soon. Now if only the hard drive prices would fall back to the levels they were, we could all buy a few and have massive amounts of storage on the cheap.

Anonymous

The ‘real-time’ up/downloads on usb flash cards within W-8/64 exceed the W-8/32 plus leave behind W-7 altogether. Tried eXfat/64; yes but not bootable but again faster than NTFS. No comparison of the two file systems; eXfat/64 or ReFS obviously the intent differs. Could be Micro/Macro views producing variously different needs/wants/functions?jackjacques@shaw.ca/

FrankPeters76

hi there,
I did a nice test between thin and thick provisioned volumes and this was very usefull. Thin provisioned performs very very bad (64kb, 4kb blocks doesn’t matter). It performs so badly that u can’t even run VM’s from a thin volume. Hope MS solves this. For now…thick is the way to go and it’s performs very very good.

Hardware: DL360G6 and DL380G6, local sas disks, 146Gb 15k.

waltc3

People have always got to put labels on things…it’s amazing. Windows 8 adds some cool new functionality–for free–and people bitch about it because it might have been “torn out of Windows Home Server 2011 and slotted into Windows 8.” Oh, gee, what an awful sin [not.] Microsoft, unlike Apple, has made its mark in providing more for less in every venue–Apple, otoh, is known for providing less for more and the Mac has always, always had the market share to back it up. Anthony sounds like he’s disappointed that Windows 8 is such a good buy, which is a tad bizarre. And, Metro is a GUI, primarily. You don’t have to use Metro, or Modern, or what ever it may be called this week, if you don’t want to. Windows 8 Pro is a darn good OS and for $39.99 for the version of Win8 x64 equivalent to Vista Ultimate (which I paid $249.00 for), you’d be only brain dead not to notice it. The more people get for their money the less they seem to appreciate it–and raw truth of the matter is that some people who really ought to know better can’t get beyond Metro/Modern GUI. A pity, since there is so much more to Windows 8 than that.

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